Forest Green Rovers will not immediately appoint a permanent manager after chairman Dale Vince confirmed that the club has held no discussions with potential candidates since Robbie Savage’s departure.
Vince said there was currently no vacancy at The New Lawn and that Forest Green was deliberately taking its time. Savage left the club the previous week to take charge of Peterborough United, but the change has not triggered an active recruitment process.
The club instead plans to give Jonathan Gould, Yan Klukowski and Josh Bowen time to show whether the first team can operate successfully without a traditional manager. The three coaches will form an interim coaching group while Forest Green assesses the approach over the coming weeks.
No immediate search for a replacement
Speaking to BBC Radio Gloucestershire’s Billy Hunt before Forest Green’s game against Hartlepool at The New Lawn, Vince said the arrangement could remain in place for only a few matches or for around a month. He stressed that the club was comfortable with its current position and was not rushing towards a decision.
“We’re not in a hurry, and we aren’t actually having any conversations. I can tell you we haven’t spoken to anybody, actually, about the role.”
Vince also rejected the idea that a named candidate was already emerging from the speculation surrounding the vacancy. He said no person was currently connected with the job because, in the club’s view, there was no job to fill at this stage.
“Nobody’s in the frame. Nobody’s connected to the job. At the minute, there is no vacancy,”
The chairman’s comments mean Forest Green’s next step is not expected to be the immediate appointment of a successor. Instead, the coaching trio will be given an opportunity to establish how responsibilities can be shared and whether the team’s performances justify continuing with the model.
Coaches bring experience and knowledge of squad
Vince said the interim coaches already possessed a broad range of relevant experience. He pointed to backgrounds extending from the Premier League to the Championship, as well as expertise in sports science, coaching and management.
He also argued that the group had an important practical advantage: its members already knew Forest Green’s players and the club’s football operation. They had worked closely with the squad during the season, meaning the club did not need to introduce an entirely new figure while the campaign was under way.
The coaching team will share responsibilities that would normally be associated with a manager. That includes rotating pre-match and post-match media interviews as Gould, Klukowski and Bowen settle into their expanded roles.
Vince said he had spent considerable time discussing the proposed structure with the coaches. Those discussions covered how the arrangement would work in practice, as well as the possible pitfalls involved in running the football operation collectively rather than placing one manager at its centre.
Chairman wants more than a short-term boost
Vince acknowledged that appointing a new manager can sometimes bring an immediate improvement in results. However, he said Forest Green wanted a more lasting outcome than the short-term uplift often described as a “new manager bounce”. He also viewed the arrival of a new person as a risk in its own right.
That has led the chairman to question whether the conventional football structure is necessarily the best one for every club. Rather than relying on one highly prominent manager, Forest Green will test whether a group-led system can produce more balanced decision-making.
“The thing I see in football is it’s always teams are led by big ego managers, and I’m not sure that they always make the best decisions,”
Vince said the club wanted to try something different and see what happened without what he described as a “big ego manager”. The experiment was not something Forest Green had originally initiated, he said, but Savage’s departure had created an opportunity to reconsider the usual approach.
Wealdstone draw offered encouragement
The chairman pointed to Forest Green’s recent 1-1 draw against Wealdstone as a reason to give the interim structure a chance. He believed the team had played well in that match, adapted its shape during the game and created opportunities that could have produced a winning result.
For Vince, that performance suggested Savage’s departure had not caused immediate disruption to the team’s ability to function. He said the club was “fine” without a manager and described the situation as part of the story of Forest Green’s season so far, rather than a crisis.
The club’s football operation will also continue to include sporting director Mark Bowen, who is expected to remain particularly influential in recruitment. Vince said Bowen understood football well and was at the heart of the work to shape the squad.
Promotion remains Forest Green’s aim
Forest Green has not abandoned its promotion ambition despite the managerial upheaval. Vince said the season was still at an early stage, describing the club as around a quarter of the way through the campaign, and argued that there was no need to panic.
For now, the focus is on improving the team and allowing the interim coaches to demonstrate what they can achieve. The length of the arrangement has not been fixed: Vince said it could last for several games or for a month, depending on how the experiment develops.
He called on supporters to back the team while the club follows the unusual route. Forest Green’s next decisions will therefore be shaped not by an announced shortlist of candidates, but by the performances and practical operation of the coaching group already in place.
“Get behind the team, right? We’re all in this for the same reason. We’re going to try something a bit different. We’ll see how it works.”
